Ruffling Left-Wing Feathers To Recharge Pacifica Radio

By IVER PETERSON

Published: December 29, 1997

BERKELEY, Calif.—
Patricia Scott readily acknowledges that her long association with left-wing politics makes her ''a part of the community that is strident about everything and objects to everything.'' So it is perhaps a paradox, but not a surprise, that someone would paint on the wall of the building where she works, ''Pat Scott is a Stalinist yuppie.''

The building is the headquarters of Pacifica Radio, and as the executive director of the foundation that operates Pacifica's five stations, Ms. Scott has been ruffling plenty of left-wing feathers as she tries to change a network that is as proud of its contrarian nature as it is worried about its dwindling audience.

Managing a broadcast enterprise with an undisguisedly political mission would be challenge enough for any executive. But Ms. Scott is also trying to rebuild the network by, for example, improving studios so that the sound of flushing toilets is no longer heard on the air and standardizing broadcast schedules in an anarchic culture that has allowed programmers to perpetuate their shows indefinitely.

Such changes would seem basic in other broadcast organizations, but they have landed Ms. Scott in a hornet's nest of attacks and recriminations from some of the most ardent arguers in the medium.

Ms. Scott, in short, stands charged by her critics of selling out Pacifica's radical legacy to the bourgeoisie (hence the ''yuppie'' accusation) by purging (hence ''Stalinist'') its quirky, highly personal and often politically extreme programming in favor of the bland and the inoffensive.

''The problem she's got is, she's got the dictator mentality who wants to come in at will and take away programs she wants off the air,'' said Erroll Maitland, a producer at Pacifica's New York station, WBAI. ''What she won't admit is, she doesn't like what we do here. We take on the officials, whether or not it's a matter of what's happening in Israel or happening in the black community.''

Ms. Scott insists that is not the real problem. ''People are not listening,'' she said in a recent interview, ''and we can't fulfill our mission if we just keep on talking to ourselves.''

The signals from Pacifica's five stations -- KPFA here in Berkeley, KPFK in Los Angeles, KPFT in Houston, WPFW in Washington and WBAI -- reach 22 percent of all American homes, about 50 million potential listeners. Yet barely 700,000 people tune in during any given week, according to Arbitron ratings. Add Pacifica's 50 independent affiliates, mostly community and college stations, and the audience reaches about one million -- still a minuscule penetration, given the reach and power of the stations.

Larry Josephson, a former WBAI morning host who now produces the syndicated show ''Bridges -- A Liberal Conservative Dialogue'' on public radio, calls the challenge facing Pacifica ''an exquisite dilemma.''

''How do they widen their appeal to the hated bourgeois liberals who got haircuts and left them in droves when the counterculture ended,'' Mr. Josephson wondered, ''without losing their own distinctive voice and their old listeners?''

After all, Mr. Josephson said, programming is not a matter of scheduling or marketing at Pacifica but a deeply revered ideology. When its Berkeley flagship, KPFA, was opened by Pacifica's founder, the pacifist broadcaster Lewis Hill, in 1948, he said, programmers refused to allow clocks in the studios ''because they thought programming should end when it ended.''

Over the years, in pursuit of Hill's mandate to be community based, Pacifica's programming came to be dominated by volunteers -- they prefer to be called ''unpaid staff'' -- whose reward was control over particular program slots. Air time was passed from friend to friend or group to group without review by station management. Ten years ago, one programmer at KPFK even tried to will his program to his widow.

As a result of such practices, Ms. Scott says, Pacifica's stations became ''balkanized'' into a patchwork of disconnected programs devoted to increasingly strident personal and political views.

Pacifica's strategic plan for the turn of the century, published earlier this year by the foundation, described this situation as ''anarchic or bureaucratic systems that are simply dysfunctional in today's fierce competition.''

Perhaps the action that attracted the most heated response was Ms. Scott's attempt to keep volunteer programmers at WBAI out of a union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. She is currently appealing a National Labor Relations Board ruling siding with the volunteers -- a ruling that Ms. Scott asserts is anti-union.

''You have 28 paid staff and 200 volunteers, and those 200 volunteers get to ratify a contract covering the 28 paid workers?'' Ms. Scott said. ''It just doesn't make sense to me.''

Ms. Scott, 54, is a graduate of Illinois State University with a Master of Fine Arts from U.C.L.A. She worked with the famed Berkeley Co-op, a 60's alternative market, was an assistant to the Berkeley mayor and was an organizer in civil rights and anti-war activities before joining KPFA in mid-1980's, first as an advisory board member and then as general manager. In 1994, she was named director of the Pacifica Foundation and given a mandate to overhaul the faltering network.

''I don't have to prove my agenda to anyone,'' she said.

After reworking Pacifica's governing structure to place more control with the foundation's board and with local station managers, Ms. Scott moved to replace patchwork scheduling with more conventional programming by offering her stations syndicated programs at consistent times of the day. These include ''We the People'' with Jerry Brown at 7 P.M. and ''Democracy Now!'' with Amy Goodman.

At the same time, Ms. Scott and her more unified board built a new studio headquarters in Berkeley for KPFA, moving the station out of a dilapidated Victorian house where on-air hosts had to speak over the sound of bathroom plumbing. The transmitter in Los Angeles has undergone a $100,000 refurbishment, while the Houston studios have been rebuilt at a cost of $300,000. The New York station has also received new equipment and will soon move from its West 34th Street site to a larger space at 120 Wall Street -- a neighborhood that some WBAI staff members object to on principle.

Meanwhile, listenership has begun to inch upward, according to Arbitron ratings released by the network, and in some areas the audience has grown by half, although not consistently.

Still, the critics wonder what difference more listeners will make if they are getting a diluted message.

''What about the quality of the listening experience?'' David Adelson, a research neurophysiologist at U.C.L.A. and an adviser to the KPFK board, asked in his 4,800-word overview of the issues for the anti-Scott ''Free Pacifica'' site on the World Wide Web.

''If one is market-driven, 10 percent more consumer-oriented listeners is better than 10 percent fewer,'' he wrote. But the mission of Pacifica, he added, was to deliver ''a 100 percent or 500 percent more meaningful and politically empowering experience for those who do listen.''

Photo: Patricia Scott has come under fire for changes made at Pacifica. (Robin Weiner for The New York Times)(pg. D9)